SonyFirst 'light roomed' shot with the Sony RX100

Regular

Took this little gem of a camera out today round the back of where i work in Gloucestershire. Wanted to see just how much detail i could drag out of the camera when processing in LR4. I am very very pleasantly pleased, particularly with the sky, because the amount of detail i managed to retrieve from the sky is quite incredible. The sensor in this camera is quite frankly astounding. I never even realised there was blue sky when i looked at the RAW, let alone cloud detail!

Regular

The new LR4 grad filter really does pull out some astounding detail. I remember when i took the shots yesterday, the sky was completely blown (according to the camera), but there must have been detail there to rescue. I even took some shots of the sky at the end of my sojourn just incase i needed to use it as a background.

I also used Viveza 2 to selectively expose certain areas.

There's a blue sky here today so i may go to the same spot and see how rich a blue sky can be with this little gem.

Regular

No. i have tried this once before mainly out of curiosity, but with a different camera, and the results were not pretty. If one can make small and subtle changes, then no probs, but otherwise I wouldnt waste my time.

The RX100 jpegs actually have a LOT of processing latitude, way more than a lot of jpegs do. The Fuji X-100 and X-Pro jpegs also have loads of latitude. But with the RX100, there are still limits to what you can do with WB, and at higher ISO there are some pretty ugly NR artifacts that even show up and reasonable viewing sizes. With the raw files, you get more latitude (even though you might not need it often) and you get reasonably "pure" noise. There's plenty of noise at 3200 and 6400 but there's also a LOT of detail and it can clean up reasonably well in Lightroom. There's a lot less space between raw and jpegs with these files than with a lot of cameras, but there's still a difference.

Just for example, here's a shot my wife took of me, directly into the sun - I realized the mistake right away and she took another from a better angle, but I decided to play with this anyway.

Using as crude a tool as snapseed on my ipad, this is what I got when I processed the jpeg and raised my face out of the darkness. Remarkably clean, but its processed for the clouds, so my face has a bit more texture than it otherwise might. I've since played with it in Lightroom on my mac and its remarkably clean with ZERO NR applied beyond the lowest NR setting in-camera. I find this pretty amazing. I remember fighting with Olympus raw files from everything prior to the OMD and not being able to pull shadows without horrendous noise. This is with a jpeg and there's essentially NONE. This is a recent development in my experience: